Lessons from Ellerslie

Today was the release of the judging results for the Ellerslie Flower Show 2014, and to our greatest surprise, our design had actually won a 'Silver with Distinction' award! (The second greatest surprise was the fact that we were all looking at another site, just right behind ours, when the judges were presenting our site with the award, sigh. We missed our chance to take a photo when being presented with our award!)

There are quite a few takeaways from participating in the emergent designers category, but probably all could be summed up with this one sentence: I've learnt that there is a lot that I do not know.

1. I do not know how to properly articulate my thoughts;
I am still rather fearful of putting down the ideas of others because of my own doubts. Many a times it comes to me debating within myself if I should raise my opinion and feel like I'm such a pessimist, or if I should keep it mum to myself, only to be casting doubt on everything mentioned internally. I think I need to respect my teammates more; to be more certain in their abilities to achieve things, and in their thinking, rather than to be so prideful and think the best out of my own ideas. By doing so, I should then recognise that me throwing out my own thoughts and ideas is also a way of acknowledging that we are all equal - sheesh this disgusting pride of mine. But sure enough, this competition really did give me a huge beating on my ego.

2. I do not know how to create a proper planting plan, yet;
Sure, drawing one up on Vectorworks and then printing it off as a PDF looks classy and professional and all, but putting actual plants away from the plan but in real life is a whole different thing. Clearly from my planting plan, I didn't understand the different layers in the vertical scale. And now that we've created a site, I get what it means to design with texture, with shapes and sizes, with colour.

3. I do not know how to construct things, yet;
Having a first try at constructing actual structures was, tough. I thought I knew how to hammer and nail things in, I thought I could basically figure out physics a little, but there were many more problems that we encountered with each day than we had actually thought there might have been. I've learnt a lot more about it now though, with the simple things, like buying (appropriate) timber, nails, screws, tools, and about mitre cuts and different ways of creating good finishes. Not that our site was at a fantastic level of a finish, but I am picking it up, slowly, but surely.

4. I do not know how to realistically budget things, yet;
Who would have known that plants and materials can be THIS expensive? Originally thinking that 4k was quite a huge sum, we've somehow managed to blow all our money and are now only left with a couple of hundred dollars - which we'll need to deconstruct our site. In future, I should consider which would require a greater investment - for instance, buying a hand saw versus buying a normal saw - the savings in terms of time versus costs. Little things like that.

5. I do not understand the physical qualities and characteristics of materials, yet;
Did not think that our 2.4m timber posts would bend out of shape because of them getting wet and then having different sides dry at different rates. Did not think that driftwood would have been so strong and hard. Did not think that our potted aquatic plants would float despite our attempts to embed them in stone. Did not think that our pond dye would have stained the stones we ordered. But now, we know.

There's probably still a lot more to add onto this list, but that's all the time I have to blog for today. That said, I don't expect myself to be striking things off this list any time soon. It's all a learning experience, so, learn I shall.

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